The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente [13]
September’s stomach hurt. She found it terribly hard to speak.“I’ve only just gotten here, Miss Goodbye. I…I don’t think I want to be anything but myself just yet. It would be like deciding on the spot to become a geologist back home. What if I don’t like rocks when I’m older? Witchery sounds very nice now, but I’m sure I should take better care with my…my prospects.”
“But the future, child! Just think of it! If you see something you don’t like--pop! In go leek and licorice and you can change it. What could be better?”
“Does it really work that way? Can you really change the future?”
Manythanks shrugged. “I’m sure it’s been done once or twice,” he said.
September wrenched her eyes away from Goodbye’s loveliness. Her head cooled and cleared and smoothed itself out. “Miss,” she said, “don't you really just want your Spoon back?”
Goodbye stood up abruptly and brushed off her black dress. The perfume was gone, and she shrank a bit, still a somewhat handsome woman, but the glow, the perfect colors of her, were muted and usual again.
“Yes,” she said curtly. “I can’t get it, the Marquess has lions.”
“Well…you don’t have to shine at me and offer me a bustle, you know. I…I could get it for you. Maybe I could get it for you. Anyway, I could try. What did I come to Fairyland for, after all? To wander around on the beach like my grandfather, looking for dropped wedding rings?” September laughed for the first time since leaving Omaha, picturing her grandfather in his patched jacket waving his metal detector over the beach of Fairy gold. A quest, she thought, excitement rising in her like bread, a real quest like a real knight, and she doesn’t even see that I’m short and I don’t have a sword.
“Well…how gallant of you, child,” said Hello. “She didn’t mean to offend with her shining…it’s only that the Marquess is fearful and fell. Long ago, she hunted witches. She rode out on a great panther and wielded her iceleaf bow against us. She broke our mother’s Spoon across her back and killed our brothers, Farewell and Wellmet. Fine witches in the prime of their craft, all pierced with her arrows, laid out in the snow. And all because we would not give her what she wanted.”
“What did she want?”
Goodbye answered, her voice thick and ugly. “A single day. She commanded us to simmer for her a single day, the day of her death, so that she could hide from it. And we would not serve her.”
September let go a long held breath. She stared into the roiling black-violet soup, thinking furiously. The trouble was, September didn’t know what sort of story she was in. Was it a merry one or a serious one? How ought she to act? If it was merry, she might dash after a Spoon and it would all be a grand adventure, with funny rhymes and somersaults and a grand party at the end with red lanterns. But if it was a serious tale, she might have to do something important, something involving with snow and arrows and enemies. Of course, we would like to tell her. But no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move. And perhaps we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.
Surely she must have suspected the shape of her tale when the Green Wind appeared in her kitchen window. Certain signs are unmistakeable. But now she is alone, poor child, and there do not seem to be too terribly many fairies about, and instead of dancing in mushroom rings she must contend with very formal witches and their dead brothers, we must pity her. It is terribly easy for me to tell you what happened to her--why, I need only choose a noun and a few verbs and off she goes! But September must do the choosing, and the going, and you must remember, from your own